As I mentioned in the recent discussion on the fighter, I have been working on my own DW hacking of all the core classes plus several new classes.
I have made a lot of progress, and wanted to share The Slayer, based off of +andrey barsky’s Witcher based class. I worked on this with my friend David in real life, and we are pretty happy with it.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nurw7zdojtdzi9t/SlayerHack.pdf
Any feedback is appreciated.
All of my hacks have switched to simplifying the stats down to just the modifiers and not using the attributes themselves. I know that Adam and Sage mainly left them in for nostalgia and hackability. But at least for playing Dungeon World itself, removing the attributes is I think almost strictly an improvement.
I thought I would go into a little bit of why I made those decisions.
It makes character creation that much simpler and easier to explain for new roleplayers, and really makes the whole system more elegant. Character creation was actually sped up a noticeable amount in three different groups, and players has less analysis paralysis in which +1 stat should get the 15 and which the 13.
I also prefer the elegance of removing numbers that only come up occasionally, but are ignored for everything else. The final benefit is that people do not need to reference a chart in the book to determine when stats increase.
Since I removed the attributes down to just the modifiers it necessitated a change in how HP was calculated. There were two ways to go about it, one was just making HP a static part of the character similar to the damage dice (this is the route I took). The second option was to somehow use the modifier for constitution in a new formula for calculating HP.
I went with the static HP values, and I actually think it is not a sacrifice of switching to modifier only, but actually a huge improvement.
HP as an inherent part of the class has the following advantages:
1. Character creation is again, simpler and faster. HP was almost always something I had to explain or confirm for players.
2. It makes class strengths more obvious and upfront. Now when a player compares the paladin and the cleric, they will see right away that a Paladin has more HP than a cleric.
3. It makes stat selection simpler and less gamey. In the old system, if you had two +1s or +0s to assign, they were not equal. You would be better off putting the 12 (not the 9) into Con to get that three higher HP, even though the modifier was the same.
Anyway those are my thoughts, again any feedback is appreciated.